PM Narendra Modi to take big steps to project dominance in the Indian Ocean Region

More than a trillion dollar trade passes through Indian Island territories towards South-East and North Asia.

Published on: Jun 28, 2024, 09:46:12 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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The Narendra Modi government is set to take big steps in maritime security in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) with approved extensions of runways at Diglipur in North Andamans and at Campbell Bay in the Great Nicobar Islands with night landings soon to take place at Port Blair airport.

It is understood that the Modi government is on the verge of approving the extension of the runway at Agatti Airport in Lakshadweep and a new runway at Minicoy Islands.

While the runway at INS Baaz in Campbell Bay will be extended by another 4000 feet to cater to big jets and fighters, the runway at INS Kohassa in Diglipur will be also extended to cater to big jets and both could be used as forward deployed air bases in cases of emergency.

To add to all this, the Indian military will soon land an Airbus 321 at night to showcase night landing capabilities at the Veer Savarkar airport in Port Blair, leaving the field wide open for commercial jets to land at night. The Veer Savarkar airport has night landing capabilities.

That the Modi government is serious about extending its sea legs in IOR is evident from the fact that six new radars will be stationed at Andamans and Nicobar Islands with new radars in Lakshadweep Islands for better maritime and air domain awareness.

Also read: For Modi, economic security is priority with China, not profit for Indian business

The runway at Campbell Bay is being expanded apart from the installation of the high-power radar as part of a proposal to set up a transshipment bay at Galathea Bay in Great Nicobar, which is merely 150 kilometers away from Banda Aceh of Indonesia. The Minicoy Islands is a mere 300 kilometers from Maldives, which is boxing way above its weight category against India in an effort to get more loans from China.

Since both A&N Islands and Lakshadweep Islands lie on the main sea lanes of communication emanating from the Suez Canal and Persian Gulf. If these proposals translate into reality soon, India will have leverage on all ingress routes to the South China Sea via Malacca, Sunda, and Lombok straits and also have early warning on PLA Navy aggression in the IOR and the Pacific.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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